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Against Ruskin AGAINST RUSKIN Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell’s recasting of Venice [Received August 28th 2020; accepted March 1st 2021 – DOI: 10.21463/shima.116] William Bainbridge University of Hertfordshire, UK <[email protected]> ABSTRACT: The images of Venice by Philadelphian Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) have never really escaped from James McNeill Whistler’s long shadow. His etchings, drawings, pastels, and lithographs all show the influence of the master. Together with his wife, Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855-1936), he would publish a two-volume biography of his friend (1908). Their allegiance to Whistler and the Barbaro Circle brought the Pennells to endorse a new image of Venice away from the hegemonic cult of Ruskin pervasive in tourist and travel books about the city. This article seeks to reassess the contribution of both Pennells to this group of erudite intellectuals and reconsider their promotion of a more truthful and intimate representation of Venice beyond the mass of tourists and polished marble façades. Its special focus is on the Pennells’ – Elizabeth’s in particular – antagonistic relationship with Ruskin, whose iconic The Stones of Venice had mourned a city forever lost to tourists, over- restoration, and the onslaught of the railroad. KEYWORDS: Joseph Pennell, Elizabeth Pennell, John Ruskin, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent Introduction Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851-1853) classically formulates a strong argument against the destruction wrought upon the aesthetic and environmental integrity of the maritime city in the 19th Century. Chief among Ruskin’s concerns were those damaging forces linked to the onslaught of mass tourism and the railroad.1 While promoting Venice as a tourist destination in its own right, however, Ruskin also argued that it was precisely tourism that was responsible for the city’s demise (Hanley, 2010). Rooted in an older style of travel, influenced by a legacy of cosmopolitanism instilled by the practices of the grand Tour, his manifesto for preserving the architectural heritage of Venice was nostalgic towards those “olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil was rewarded” (Works, 10: 3). Venice, the city of contrasts and contradictions, was under threat from the heavy- handedness of the restorer and the aspirational modernism of the town planner, both forever too keen to render their efforts in a way that would tarnish the essential qualities of the city irredeemably. Writing to his father in September 1845, he pointed repeatedly to calamities annihilating Venice brought about by decay – the palaces on the grand Canal appeared to 1 The railway bridge from Venice to the mainland was built during the Austrian occupation and inaugurated in 1846, but, by the time of Ruskin’s visit in 1845, it was already possible to walk across it (Greenfield, 1939: 315; Clegg, 1981: 55). ______________________________________________ Shima <www.shimajournal.org> ISSN: 1834-6057 Bainbridge – Against Ruskin: Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell’s recasting of Venice him as “mouldering down as if they were all leaves and autumn had come suddenly” (Shapiro, 1972: 198; Clegg, 1981: 56). The seductive image of Venice, reflected as a “mirage on the lagoon”, would be no more (Works, 9: 17) – the city itself sunk under the weight of tourists, strolling through its streets with Murray, Cook, and Baedeker guidebooks in hand (Palmowski, 2002). Ruskin was not alone in his pathos-ridden battle cry towards persevering the essence of Venice, as indefinable and ambiguous it might be. The Stones of Venice certainly cemented his authority on the plight of the city. But the decline of Venice was not only due to tourism. It was also subject to environmental conditions, such as the relentlessly fluctuating waves of the Adriatic – a hot topic frequently discussed in contemporary geographical scholarship (Fletcher and Spencer, 2005; Madricardo and Donnici, 2014). Acting as an allegorical statement on the moral condition of society and urban malaise in general, his book was not a travel guide in the traditional sense, but its prevailing influence on tourism in Venice is undeniable (Bosworth, 2015). Elizabeth Robins Pennell (1855-1936), for instance, makes it clear that she and her artist husband Joseph (1857-1926) were partly drawn to Venice because of Ruskin. She ultimately rejects, however, the way in which Ruskin’s legacy equipped individuals with all too specialised tools to experience it. In this essay, Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell offer a quieter yet important voice in this debate – a starting point from which Ruskin’s influence upon Venice studies might be regarded as less pervasive. In staging the dialogue between Ruskin and the Pennells in tentatively antagonistic terms, I seek to find clues for casting a new gaze over the city, offering historians of 19th Century Venice as well as those concerned with Venice’s current environmental fragility, a different set of tools to decode its tourist maze (Settis, 2016; Davis and Marvin, 2004). This gaze has the potential of recasting Venice away from those overused tropes and hackneyed images that rendered the city almost as a canovaccio 2 open to improvised interpretations by everyone and anyone. These tropes and images were often coloured by words that have now become almost prosaic in their stereotypical formulation, furnished with quotations penned by a ‘puritanical’ Ruskin or a ‘heroic’ Byron, and illustrated by the detailed eye of Canaletto or the atmospheric mystery of Turner. The Pennells were simultaneously part of the system which promoted these now familiar tropes, not least by their connection to a gilded circle of Anglo-American intellectuals and artists centred at Palazzo Barbaro, but they were also part of a different system that opposed established models for viewing Venice. Their books and art sought to devise an alternative framework for reorganising the signs and symbols attached to Venice at the turn of the century, away from the mould of standard typecasts and clichés to which Ruskin was often reduced in the literature for the tourist market. Ruskin’s Heritage Machine The Pennells were clearly influenced by Ruskin in both their independent and collaborative work. It appears, however, that such influence was more indebted to the aura surrounding Ruskin in the Anglo-American circles in Venice than to a careful study of his works. Joseph, for instance, openly acknowledged Ruskin’s impact upon his ways of looking: “Ruskin’s descriptions woke me up and made me see things”; but he also admitted not to have read 2 A type of scenario used by commedia dell'arte actors allowing for improvisation in their plays. _______________________________ Shima Volume 15 Number 1 2021 - 60 - Bainbridge – Against Ruskin: Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell’s recasting of Venice much in its entirety (“I never got completely through anything”), with the exception of The Elements of Drawing (Pennell, 1925: 74). He, nonetheless, uses Ruskin’s quotations prominently as an ideal commentary to the drawings and etchings featured in his Venice, the City of the Sea (1913a). In Elizabeth’s Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties (1916), the critique towards Ruskin is actually levelled against his influence on the Anglo-American communities in Venice. Her criticism, however, reveals also a reaction towards the somewhat blithe hold that Ruskin possessed over female creativity and the “Ruskin-boomed amateurs” formula, sometimes too quickly linked to women (Pennell, 1895: xvii; Nunn, 2000: 176). Needless to say, like many others writing about Venice or depicting it in art at the turn of the century, the Pennells were keen of course to acknowledge Ruskin’s authority, poetically and aesthetically, in order to convey greater credibility to their own works. By the time of the two above-mentioned publications, printed a generation after The Stones of Venice, Ruskin still held sway over literary and artistic portraits of Venice (Clegg, 1981; Hewison, 2009). Ruskin was an unavoidable name in guidebooks and travel writing on the city, independently from the position their authors might have taken on him. Now as then, histories and guides on Venice do not fail to mention him (Morris, 1960; Norwich, 2004; Ackroyd, 2009; Dragicevich and Hardy, 2020). As a youth, aspiring to enter Philadelphia’s Academy of Fine Arts, Joseph read Ruskin’s Modern Painters and even sent work to him for his approval, without getting any reply (Young, 1970: 82). This early anecdote is indicative of his long and complicated relationship with the Victorian art critic, which he shared with his wife. Throughout their writings, Ruskin appears as an easy target for forging their own identity as art critics. During his extended visit to Venice in 1845, Ruskin found the scene of Venice much changed since his stay there four years before (Clegg, 1981: 51-62). He was still able to recognise elements of the scenery as if rendered by Turner, “the greatest of all landscape painters”, whereby colour, light, buildings, and water coalesced in a unique vision (Works, 3: 530).3 This time, however, Ruskin was shocked at the sight of the new bridge connecting Mestre and Venice, bringing cold modernity directly into the city hitherto free from the steam engine and gas light (Pertot, 1988: 15-19). He wrote to his father despairingly of the scene he encountered: But to return to the grand canal, it began to look a little better as we got up to the Rialto, but, it being just solemn twilight, as we turned under the arch, behold, all up to the Foscari palace – gas lamps! on each side, in grand new iron posts of the last Birmingham fashion, and sure enough, they have them all up the narrow canals, and there is a grand one, with more flourishes than usual, just under the bridge of sighs.
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